Lectures & Handouts

Due March 25 by email - One to two (full) paragraphs describing your plans for a final project, along with the names of your collaborators. This assignment (planning out your project) will account for 5 points out of your 25 total points for your course project. Here are a few examples of final projects from previous years: 1, 2, 3, 4, 567891011121314

FYI, we stopped last class's nanopore sequencing run pretty soon after class ended. Even in that relatively short time (<30 min), our longest read (sequencing randomly shorter DNA fragments from a 40kb phage genome) was >20 kb.

Homework #3 (worth 10% of your final course grade) has been assigned on Rosalind and is due by 11:59PM March 25.

We're going to be live-demoing a nanopore single molecule DNA sequencer in class, assuming all goes well. Specifically, we'll be using an Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencer, which differs substantially from these major alternatives:

If you would like a few examples of proteins annotated with their transmembrane and soluble regions (according to UniProt) to help troubleshoot your homework, here are some example yeast protein sequences.

From last time, some definitions of sensitivity/specificity & precision/recall. Note that the gene finding community settled early on to a different definition of specificity that corresponds to the precision or PPV in other fields. Other fields define specificity as the true negative rate.

A few examples of proteins with internally repetitive sequences: 1, 2, 3

Jan 31, 2019 - Sequence Alignment I

For those of you who might be interested, Rosalind is having a Bioinformatics Contest. Sign up runs until Feb. 2, the qualification round is Feb. 2-10, and Feb. 23 is the final round, with 24 hours to solve as many problems as you can. First prize in 2019 is to get your genome (exome) sequenced or get your own nanopore sequencer!

H. influenzae genome. Haemophilus influenza was the first free living organism to have its genome sequenced. NOTE: there are some additional characters in this file from ambiguous sequence calls. For simplicity's sake, when calculating your nucleotide and dinucleotide frequencies, you can just ignore anything other than A, C, T, and G.

*** HEADS UP FOR THE PROBLEM SET *** If you try to use the Python string.count function to count dinucleotides, Python counts non-overlapping instances, not overlapping instances. So, AAAA is counted as 2, not 3, dinucleotides. You want overlapping dinucleotides instead, so will have to try something else, such as the python string[counter:counter+2] command, as explained in the Rosalind homework assignment on strings.

REMINDER: My email inbox is always fairly backlogged (e.g., my median time between non-spam emails was 11 minutes when I measured last year), so please copy the TA on any emails to me to make sure they get taken care of.

Python 2 vs 3?. For compatibility with Rosalind and other materials, we'll use version 2.7. The current plan is for Python 2.7 support to be halted in 2020, but there is some hope (wishful thinking?) that Python 4 will be backwards compatible, unlike Python 3. Regardless, you're welcome to use whichever version you prefer, but we'll use 2.7 for all class explanations in the interests of simplicity and consistency. For beginners, the differences are quite minimal.

We'll be conducting homework using the online environment Rosalind. Go ahead and register on the site, and enroll specifically for BCH394P-BCH364C-Spring2019 using this link. Homework #1 (worth 10% of your final course grade) has already been assigned on Rosalind and is due by 11:59PM January 31.

A useful online resource if you get bogged down: Python for Biologists. (& just a heads-up that some of their instructions for running code relate to a command line environment that's a bit different from the default one you install following the Rosalind instructions. It won't affect the programs, just the way they are run or how you specific where files are located.) However, if you've never programmed Python before, definitely check this out!!!

Open to graduate students and upper division undergrads (with permission) in natural sciences and engineering.
Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with molecular biology, statistics & computing, but realistically, it is expected that students will have extremely varied backgrounds. Undergraduates have additional prerequisites, as listed in the catalog.

Note that this is not a course on practical sequence analysis or using web-based tools. Although we will use a number of these to help illustrate points, the focus of the course will be on learning the underlying algorithms and exploratory data analyses and their applications, esp. in high-throughput biology.

Most of the lectures will be from research articles and slides posted online, with some material from the...Optional text (for sequence analysis):Biological sequence analysis, by R. Durbin, S. Eddy, A. Krogh, G. Mitchison (Cambridge University Press),

No exams will be given. Grades will be based on online homework (counting 30% of the grade), 3 problem sets (given every 2-3 weeks and counting 15% each towards the final grade) and an independent course project (25% of final grade). The course project will consist of a research project on a bioinformatics topic chosen by the student (with approval by the instructor) containing an element of independent computational biology research (e.g. calculation, programming, database analysis, etc.). This will be turned in as a link to a web page. The final project is due by midnight, April 29, 2019. The last 2.5 classes will be spent presenting your projects to each other. (The presentation will account for 5/25 points for the project.)

Online homework will be assigned and evaluated using the free bioinformatics web resource Rosalind.

All projects and homework will be turned in electronically and time-stamped. No makeup work will be given. Instead, all students have 5 days of free “late time” (for the entire semester, NOT per project, and counting weekends/holidays). For projects turned in late, days will be deducted from the 5 day total (or what remains of it) by the number of days late (in 1 day increments, rounding up, i.e. 10 minutes late = 1 day deducted). Once the full 5 days have been used up, assignments will be penalized 10 percent per day late (rounding up), i.e., a 50 point assignment turned in 1.5 days late would be penalized 20%, or 10 points.

Students are welcome to discuss ideas and problems with each other, but all programs, Rosalind homework, problem sets, and written solutions should be performed independently. Students are expected to follow the UT honor code. Cheating, plagiarism, copying, & reuse of prior homework, projects, or programs from CourseHero, Github, or any other sources are all strictly forbidden and constitute breaches of academic integrity (UT academic integrity policy) and cause for dismissal with a failing grade.